Islanders: The Making of the Mediterranean, currently showing at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, is one of the most beautifully curated exhibitions you're likely to see this year. You are ushered in to the sounds the sea, calmed by a palette of blue, white and terracotta. Gauze softens the edges of the room as you meander around oval island displays. The blown-up images of Greece, like holiday brochures on the walls, are intrusively unnecessary because you have already been transported to the Mediterranean. But this is also an exhibition full of detailed scholarship, the end product of a four year research project which starts with a complex timeline of the three islands featured - Crete, Cyprus and Sardinia - and ends by challenging you with the question of what it means to be an islander in Britain today.
This duality - aesthetic versus intellectual - is a problem which the exhibition never really reconciles. The overall premise - that these are disparate yet connected communities - is slippery enough to grasp and the broadly thematic structure means it is increasingly difficult to keep hold of the complex shifts of time and space. I went round the exhibition twice, the first time carefully reading the informative but often annoyingly placed labels, getting steadily more and more frustrated by my own inability to keep all the mental plates spinning.
Second time round, I was happy to drift; to enjoy the wonders. And there are wonders aplenty. Figurines old beyond time which, with their clean lines and formal simplification would pass as twentieth century modernism in miniature. Elegantly carved faces which seem more East Asian than Mediterranean. A lion's head earring, so tiny and so beautifully worked that you literally press your nose to the glass of the display, entranced by the gleaming gold. Reassuringly familiar hints of Egypt, Assyria, Classical Greece. Cretan Kamares pottery with rich coloured geometry which directly resonates with the other exhibition on in Cambridge at the moment: Lucy Rie at Kettle's Yard. Mundane practicality - copper ingots, ox-hide shaped for ease of carrying and stacking - alongside primitive mystery - an ancient Sardinia warrior figure with four eyes, four arms and two shields.
A treasure trove. And it's free. You can pay over £15 to see Labyrinth at the Ashmolean. I haven't seen this and I'm not judging. But if you have a wander round the rest of the Fitzwilliam, you can't help feeling it could do with a little TLC: some new wall coverings, some revamped displays. The museum lost out in the last round of Arts Council funding, despite the fact that the place was packed mid-week in March, despite the fact that they consistently put on fantastic, innovative exhibitions like Islanders. So go if you can, make a donation if you are able, enjoy the love, care and scholarship that has gone into it and lose yourself among the beauty of the islands.
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